Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned boxes

Fri Oct 10 00:44:35 UTC 2003

Margie Arbon wrote:

> I am curious as to why open proxies, compromised hosts, trojans and
> routing games are not considered operational issues simply because
> the vehicle being discussed is spam.
> 
> With all due respect, we have a *problem*. End user machines on
> broadband connections are being misconfigured and/or compromised in
> frightening numbers.  These machines are being used for everything
> from IRC flooder to spam engines, to DNS servers to massive DDoS
> infrastructure. If the ability of a teenager to launch a gb/s DDoS,
> or of someone DoSing mailservers off the internet with a trojan that
> contains a spam engine is not operational, perhaps it's just me
> that's confused.
> 
> Two-three years ago the warnings were ignored because it was only
> IRC. Now it's only spam.  What does it take to make the Network
> Operators and NANOG decide that things that are a "very bad thing" on
> one protocol generally can bite you later on another if you ignore it
> because it's only <insert your least favorite program or protocol
> here>?

I believe that to be one of the most succint summaries of the issues
as I have read.